My main research interest at the moment is examining the role played by translators and interpreters in mediating conflict. The underlying assumption of my work is that whoever undertakes it, and whatever form it takes, translation is never a by-product of social and political developments. It is part and parcel of the very process that makes these developments possible in the first place. Translation is also not innocent. It is not about "building bridges" or "enabling communication" as is commonly assumed, but about the active circulation and promotion of narratives. Morally speaking, it is neither inherently good nor inherently bad in itself - it depends on the nature of the narratives it promotes and in which it is embedded, and of course on the narrative location of the person assessing it.

In all types of conflict, but particularly in an international conflict such as the war on Iraq and the so-called war on terror, translation is central to the ability of all parties to legitimize their version of events, their narratives. Since this type of conflict is played out in the international arena and cannot simply be resolved by appealing to local constituencies at home, each party to the conflict has to rely on various processes of translation to elaborate and promote a particular narrative. I am interested in studying the way in which translation functions in this context, including the selection of texts to be translated, the type of people involved in translating them (irrespective of whether they are professional translators), and the various agendas they serve. This includes researching the use of translation by powerful, well-funded institutions as well as its use by various groups of peace activists and humanitarian organisations with little or no funding and no access to major media outlets.

Related publications include Translation and Conflict: A Narrative Account (Routledge 2006), "Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community" (The Massachusetts Review, 2006), "Reframing Conflict in Translation" (Social Semiotics 2007), ''Resisting State Terror: Communities of Activist Translators and Interpreters'' (in press), 'Ethics of Renarration' (interview with Andrew Chesterman, to appear in Cultus), "Contextualization in Translator- and Interpreter-mediated Events" (Journal of Pragmatics) and "Narratives in and of Translation" (SKASE Journal of Translation and Interpretation, 2005). A talk I gave at Fujian Normal University in China in 2006, entitled 'Translation as Renarration', summarises some of this work.

My second area of research interest is the use of corpora as a resource for studying various features of translation, including the distinctive nature of translated text and the distinctive styles of individual translators (see Baker 1993, 1995, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2004, in press, Olohan and Baker 2000). The nature and pressures of the translation process are bound to leave traces in the language that translators (and interpreters) produce. Some of this patterning has been explained in terms of notions such as simplification (a tendency on the part of translators to simplify the language or message or both) and explicitation (the tendency to spell things out in translation, including - in its simplest form - the practice of adding background information). The kind of methodology available from corpus linguistics offers one of the most effective ways of capturing such distinctive features of translation, because it allows us to study a massive amount of text and identify global patterning that is difficult or impossible to capture through manual analyses. A corpus of translated text can also be used to study variation in the output of individual translators (as in Baker 2000, 2004), the impact of specific source languages on the patterning of the target language, the impact of text type on translation strategies, and various other issues which are of interest to both the translation scholar and the corpus linguist. For more details on this research area, browse the pages of the Translational English Corpus, the largest corpus of translated language anywhere in the world. TEC received funding from the British Academy in the past and continues to be housed at the Centre for Translation and Intercultural Studies.